


Three Times Judith Didn't Open the Locked Door(s)

by Port



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, La Barbe bleue | Bluebeard - Charles Perrault
Genre: F/M, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 07:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14636784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Port/pseuds/Port
Summary: Bluebeard admonishes his wife not to open the door that belongs to the little key he entrusts to her. In these stories, she never does turn the key.





	Three Times Judith Didn't Open the Locked Door(s)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).



> Thedevilchicken, I hope you enjoy the fic! I really enjoyed writing it for you and considering the possibilities the original leaves open. Thank you for the great and insightful prompts!
> 
> I also have to thank the mods for their patience and much-needed help making this something that my requester might like. Thank you for your attention and all the work you do for this challenge!
> 
> Story notes: Judith's name, and indeed most of the third story, come from Bela Bartok's opera Bluebeard's Castle. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUNpYU5UGg0) is a wonderful (non-theatrical) performance; if you're lucky enough to see a repeat of the Met version either live or at the movie theater, it is a stunning work of psychological horror, not to be missed.

1

_They ceased not to extol and envy the happiness of their friend, who in the meantime in no way diverted herself in looking upon all these rich things, because of the impatience she had to go and open the closet on the ground floor. She was so much pressed by her curiosity that, without considering that it was very uncivil for her to leave her company, she went down a little back staircase, and with such excessive haste that she nearly fell and broke her neck._

In fact, she did break her neck, and that was how her friends found her, not long after, at the bottom of the little stair.

Had it been a staircase the height of the double-stair that flaunted itself at the main entrance of Bluebeard’s castle, Judith might have killed herself upon it. Luckily, she had fallen with less than fatal force and only tumbled a little ways. Her broken neck might even heal properly, given rest and tender medical attention.

Her party of friends immediately changed moods from wonder and envy to worry and sympathy. They divided into groups with tasks: carefully remove Judith to a bed, call a doctor, get some water boiling and clean linen prepared. Her friend Henry grabbed up the ring of keys she had dropped and promised to find them all some wine to take the edge off their alarm.

He climbed deeper into the cellar while everyone else progressed upstairs. “Judith must have been on her way to the wine cellar,” he supposed, since there was nothing down here except cobwebs and a bad smell. He paused to light a lantern and looked around for where the wine must be kept. All he could find was one door. A viscous red liquid leaked out from beneath, which he attributed to a broken bottle. It gave him pause, since he neither wanted to be blamed for the broken bottle nor responsible for cleaning it up. He only resumed trying keys in the lock when he realized that a servant could be the answer to both problems.

So Henry opened the closet door and stood staring inside for some time. He almost didn’t notice when he dropped the keys in the blood.

The entire party was quite surprised when Bluebeard returned from his business trip early. Self-conscious to be in his home without exactly having a host, they showed him to Judith’s room and explained what had happened, with many assurances that the doctor had said she would likely recover. Bluebeard did not pay their exit much attention after he sank to the floor beside Judith’s head and held her limp hand. Henry, the only one remaining, had to cough to get his attention.

“Yes?” Bluebeard asked, over his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, but I’ve been holding on to your keys all this time,” Henry said, holding them out.

Now Bluebeard did turn all the way around and stand up. “My… keys.”

“Yes.” Henry held out the ring. Half the keys were stained in blood. Bluebeard turned them over in his hand.

“I must assume the blood comes from my wife’s accident.”

“Ah, no. There was no blood involved in Judith’s fall.”

“I… see.”

“The keys must have been stained before she fell.”

Bluebeard stared hard at Henry. “Yes, I do see.”

They shook hands, and Henry really did understand why no one could quite take the blue of his beard. He excused himself and went home with the rest of his party.

They were all very sad, days later, to learn of her tragic death. 

 

2

It was lonely married to a man with an awful blue beard. Judith had decided she could endure it, but she understood why her friends and family hesitated to visit. So she and her husband enjoyed a lavish lifestyle with only servants for company, and them highly paid. It was summer months outside, but Judith felt sunk in midwinter, all her thoughts blue and gray, until her shoulders slumped and her eyes lost focus.

Perhaps tiring of her low mood one day, Bluebeard announced a business trip that would take him away for six weeks. “Am I really that poor company?” she wondered when he told her.

“You must invite your friends and family over while I’m gone and make good cheer,” he replied. She was so struck by this kind wish for her happiness, and the dawning suspicion that he was only leaving so that others would feel comfortable visiting, that she hardly heard his instructions about the keys, nor did more than note the strange emphasis he gave them.

Bluebeard rode off, and her friends and family rode in. Judith was exhilarated to see them. All she wanted to do was sit with them and walk in the country with them and stay up late laughing with them. But all they wanted to do was run through the castle admiring the gold and furniture and artwork. Admittedly, those things had excited Judith at first too; she hoped that she hadn’t been as obvious about it to her husband as her friends and family were being with her, but she suspected that was not the case.

Finally worn down from the visit, Judith retired to a private drawing room and felt her shoulders sag and her watched her vision grow blurry. 

Perhaps her guests would have remembered their manners and their friendship sooner or later, but Bluebeard returned early the next day, and they rode out not much later. Judith found herself pleased, and she did everything she could to show her husband that was true.

The next morning at breakfast, Judith was admiring the sunny garden out the window, the open flowers and the random trajectories of the butterflies, when Bluebeard asked for his keys back. “Oh, yes,” she said, drawing them out of her pocket. “Thank you for lending them to me.”

He took and counted them, frowning when his eye fell on the littlest one. He took it off the ring and examined it closely.

“Is something wrong?” Judith asked. This was puzzling behavior, and she worried that perhaps she had forgotten to perform a chore associated with the little key. She had felt so distracted when he gave the ring to her.

“You didn’t use this key?” Bluebeard demanded.

“Was I supposed to?” Bluebeard had never spoken to her harshly, but this came very close.

He raised one eyebrow, studying her as though looking for a lie or any sign of dishonesty. Judith was just beginning to feel offended when his face changed, settling into cautious reassurance.

“No, my dear. Please excuse my rudeness. You won’t see anything of its sort again.”

And throughout their long and happy marriage, he kept his promise. Judith assured all her friends and family of that fact in every letter she wrote.

 

3

Judith sighed. The game had been amusing at first, but she did of course live here and was already familiar with Bluebeard’s rooms and furniture and belongings. Her friends had been intensely curious, though, so she’d played along while she could, using the keys he’d given her to open all the locked doors and allow her friends to gawk and gasp. 

“All right, you’ve worn me out. I’m to bed. Here are the keys if you still want to play.” She held out the ring of keys to her friends, who snatched it up. Their laughter echoed after her down the halls, making her shake her head.

Hours later, screams woke her from a dream about her husband holding hands with a man she didn’t recognize. Frightened, she sat up in bed, listening.

It was her friends. It sounded like all of them, screaming in terror.

Judith wished Bluebeard were here, but she was lady of the house. If there were danger or an emergency, she would need to handle it. Grimly, she put her feet on the floor and pulled her white silk robe over her shoulders. More screams shook her, and she forgot to put on her slippers before running down the hall.

It didn’t occur to her that this could be a strange new game; they sounded unhinged.

The hallways were dark, no servants about to light them. Despite the inconvenience, Judith didn’t blame them; if she were a servant, she would be cowering under the bed. Following the screams and cries took her to a far wing, and then down a set of treacherous steps not suited to her bare feet. She also wished she had worn a heavier robe.

Judith called into the darkness, “I’m here, you all. Please stop screaming. What is the matter?”

The awful cries died down, although someone was sobbing. Judith held her breath when firelight appeared in the distance, creating a yellow-orange rectangle that was a corridor in the blackness before her. In for a penny, Judith entered the corridor. Halfway down, she found with relief one of her friends, holding a lantern. 

“Judith, thank God you’re all right.” Her friend set down the lantern and hugged her.

“Of course I’m fine,” Judith said, surprised by the strength of her friend, a young woman who always comported herself delicately. This was a great unguarded embrace. “You’re all the ones waking the dead.”

Her friend flinched and drew away. Judith noticed a patch of red on her clothes and automatically looked down, spotting a red blotch on her nightgown. She touched it and grimaced when the tacky substance transferred to her hand. She opened her mouth, and only then realized her friend had been speaking, rapidly explaining.

“--gave us the keys, we thought of a new game. We decided to use each one, open each of the doors they went to. It took hours to find them all, and there were such fine things behind each door, but finally there was just the one little key. We searched and searched, and finally Henry suggested it might be to a wine cellar, so we found these stairs behind you, to the basement, and seven locked doors.”

Judith had never been down here; her husband had warned her not to go and not to use the little key. She had forgotten to warn them against using that last key. She should have taken it off the ring, put it somewhere safe until her friends had gone back home. The temptation to use it herself had been strong, but if she disobeyed Bluebeard then she wanted to do it after some consideration and in private.

“What have you done?” she demanded.

“Oh, Judith, we opened all the doors.” Her friend began to weep.

Judith looked back down at the blood on her fingers, then took up the lantern and walked past her friend, deeper into the corridor. When she came to the first open door, another of her friends stood blocking the view inside. She peered over his shoulder and saw piles of gold coins, so numerous that there was no room to walk inside. And drenching the gold, dulling their shine, pooled at the edges of the piles--blood.

Her friend was transfixed. She left him and moved to the second open door. Just inside, another of her friends sat against the wall, hugging her knees and sobbing. Judith turned slowly in a circle, taking in the shackles and strange implements of torture. She made herself look closely at the wood and iron tools. More blood. 

She patted her inconsolable friend on the shoulder and went to the third door. Across from it, another of her friends was pulling his hair, talking quietly to himself. He seemed to be trying to calm himself down, so she left him to it and entered. There were all kinds weapons, neatly arrayed on racks and hooks. They too had blood on the edges and points. She hadn’t known that Bluebeard had been a soldier, but then she remembered that their country had not had a war in a hundred years.

A chill was slowly freezing its way up her spine, but she moved on. At the fourth door, she found a friend holding a rose, contemplating it quietly. Those were out of season, and Judith had never seen one so red. In fact, it was red and white. Well, on closer inspection, it was white and covered in blood. Her friend’s hands were stained, could almost have been bleeding. She looked up at Judith. “The whole garden was so beautiful. But it’s watered with blood.”

Judith went inside and found a garden stretching out as far as she could see, with shapely trees standing gracefully over lush beds of tulips, chrysanthemums, daisies, irises, asters, amaryllis, and a hundred other colorful flowers. It was dark, the lantern showing unending beauty in just its weak light. Fireflies pulsed lazily in the air, and she had a feeling that when the sun rose outside, it would in here too. But her friend was right about the blood. It was everywhere, dripping from every leaf and petal.

The next door she could hardly bear to contemplate for long. One of her friends had fainted before it and was being helped by another, who kneeled with his back to the open door. Inside was a view as from a mountaintop, of a vast kingdom overshadowed by clouds. Wherever the shadows fell was a red darkness.

Judith wished her friends were gone and her husband here with her, but this was how it had played out. She walked to the sixth door, not noticing that her bare feet left bloody tracks.

Her friend there wore an expression of distaste, like she had swallowed something she regretted. Judith thought she could relate. She shone the lantern inside and was surprised to see light reflected back at her. It glinted off a perfectly silver-blue lake, with smooth, unrippled water. Near her feet, it lapped in the gentlest way, and the distant shores were a white, sharp line. The lake was so clear you could see to the bottom. There were no fish in it. Judith had the strangest thirst to taste the water, her mouth as dry as it had ever been. But she remembered her friend. Indeed, when she turned back and asked, her friend said, “Tears. It’s a lake of tears.”

Judith nodded. Of course it was.

As she approached the last door, she became aware of sobbing and several voices speaking hoarsely to each other. When she arrived, the last few of her friends were standing in a circle, conferring with each other. They broke off when they saw her.

“Judith, don’t--” said one.

“No, she must,” interrupted another.

She didn’t know which she agreed with, but turned anyway to the door. Behind her, she had the sense of everyone holding their breath. Before her were three women who would never draw breath again. Their bodies were slumped in three corners. They had died messily. Judith looked for a long while at the fourth corner, empty, none of the blood yet reaching it. She was sure they all thought she was composing herself, but in reality the disappointment was almost too much to bear.

Everyone agreed that they must pack up and leave the castle before Bluebeard returned. It was a frenzy of preparations. The servants mostly stayed, which made Judith consider staying as well, though she knew her friends wouldn’t stand for it, and might get her brothers involved to come take her home by force. So she packed up and climbed into a carriage with her stunned and silent friends at dawn. 

Along the way, she looked out the window and compared the grey landscape to the vivid kingdom behind the fifth door, that had been so difficult to deal with in the red shadows of the clouds. She wondered what it might have been like to climb down there, perhaps with Bluebeard holding her hand, helping her, telling her its terrible history. Perhaps she would have felt frightened, like her friends. But perhaps she would have known someone for the first time in her life. She sat back and closed her eyes, unable to bear her own resentment.

When their carriage passed Bluebeard’s horse on the road, she pushed her way out and climbed up into his saddle. He tightened one arm around her middle, and together they went home to his castle.

End.


End file.
